Memories of sunny days at the beach, with warm sand and a cool sea and often a biting wind! Here a big sister gives her little sister a helping hand as she explores the waters edge.

I like doing these quick sketches which capture that special moment freezing it in time and evoking memories for years to come.

They are done with a 4B soft pencil which starts very sharp but then gets a nice bevelled edge which makes interesting lines of varying thickness. It is done ‘alla prima’ with corrections done by drawing over the top of lines more firmly. The paper is just ordinary computer printer paper 80 gsm which has a nice surface for quick drawing. Good quality papers have too much tooth! Which means their surface has textures which I don’t want in this type of drawing.

I scan and clean up the image on photoshop and tweek the tone as pencil can sometimes be too feint in reproduction.

Finally I import the cleaned up image into ‘Publisher’ and print cards and A4 prints for sale in my shop.

The card stock is pre-scored 350gsm white card and the A4 prints look best when printed on ‘Bockingford’ Watercolour Inkjet paper 190gsm.